- The papers in Vol
2, Issue 4 of the African Studies Quarterly, http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i4.htm
are edited transcripts of oral presentations given at the Walter
Rodney International Conference held at Binghamton University, State
University of New York, Binghamton, on November 6-8, 1998. Professor Ali
A. Mazrui, Ambassador Dudley Thomas, Q.C., Professor Jacob Ade Ajayi,
and Professor Ricardo Laremont were participants on a panel devoted to
the topic of reparations. Similar presentations to those printed here
were made at a Round Table of the African Studies Association held in
Chicago, Illinois, October 29-November 1, 1998.
Todd Leedy of the African Studies Quarterly Editorial Committee provides an introduction to the papers. http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i4a1.htm
In a paper entitled FROM SLAVE SHIP TO SPACE SHIP: AFRICA BETWEEN MARGINALIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION, Professor Ali A. Mazrui maintains that reparations are due to Africa not merely to rectify the Atlantic slave trade, but also to address the damages incurred under colonial and neo-colonial systems. http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i4a2.htm
In a paper entitled POLITICAL VERSUS LEGAL STRATEGIES FOR THE AFRICAN SLAVERY REPARATIONS MOVEMENT, Professor Ricardo Laremont examines the various options available for gaining some form of reparations. http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i4a3.htm
Ambassador Dudley Thomas, Q.C. in a paper of the same title, says, "The debt has not been paid; the accounts have not been settled!" http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v2/v2i4a4.htm
See also http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/index.htm
- H-NET List for
African History and Culture [H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU]
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 01:46:59
From: moupou mose, University of Yaounde I
<mmoupou@hotmail.com>
A week ago, the French Parliament voted a law recognizing the slave trade as a crime against humanity. My questions are:
1) How significant is this for African History and for the diaspora?
2) Many schools of thought are developed on this issue. Among which is the one asking for a financial compensation (like late Abatcha and even some members of the OAU). If at all that compensation is given, what can it represent as compared to dignity of people affected and who are still suffering worldwide for it?
3) Can we foresee the recognition of colonization as crime against humanity and the compensation of African countries for the spoliation of African goods?
- http://www.africasia.com/icpubs/na/dec99/nacs1204.htm
New African
December 1999
For Whom the Bell Tolls:
The Legal Basis for the African Reparations Claim
In April 1993, the British lawyer Lord Anthony Gifford (a Queens Counsel) who now lives in Jamaica with his Jamaican wife, presented a paper on the legal basis for the African slavery reparations claim at the first ever conference on the subject held in Abuja, Nigeria.
The conference was organised by the late Chief M.K.O Abiola, the president Nigeria never had.
Lord Gifford himself is an enigma of sorts. His photo graced the cover of our last month's issue. How we got it is a story itself.
Because of the causes he champions, Lord Gifford appears to be disliked by his own people. Last month, we combed the whole of London trying to get an up-to-date photo of him. Not even the House of Lords press office had one.
We tried the other big photo agencies -Reuters, Associated Press, the Press Association - none of them had a photo of the Lord who served in the House of Lords for many years, not even a file photo.
The House of Lords press office kindly referred us to the relatively smaller Universal Pictorial Press & Agency, but what they had was a 1987 (repeat 1987) photo of him, and we couldn't use it.
We were finally rescued by Ian Hall, president of the Bloomsbury International Society, whose wife, Rahda Williams, had taken a photo of Lord Gifford at an event in London in 1998. That is the measure of the man who has become the foremost white supporter of the African reparations cause.
Below is his legal basis for the African slavery reparations claim...
"I am a lawyer who has striven for human rights and justice in many parts of the world. Much of my work has concerned the manifold injustices which are caused by the evil of racism. Especially, I have stood in solidarity with black people in Britain in their bitter and continuing struggle for equal rights, and with the liberation movements of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa, in the still unfinished cause of complete African liberation. I now live and practice law in Jamaica.
I believe that the cause of reparations to Africa and Africans in the diaspora is rooted in fundamental justice - a justice which over-arches every struggle and campaign which African people have waged to assert their human dignity.
For the iniquities perpetrated against African people today - whether in South Africa by the apartheid regime, in Mozambique and Angola by terrorist forms of destabilisation, in Britain and the USA by racist attacks and by systems of discrimination - are the continuing consequences, the damages as lawyers would say, flowing from the 400-year-long atrocity of the slave system.
For me as a lawyer, it is essential to locate the claim for reparations within a framework of law and justice.
If this were merely an appeal to the conscience of the white world, it would be misconceived. For while there have been many committed individuals and movements of solidarity in the white world, its political and economic power centres have evidenced a ruthless lack of conscience when it comes to black and African peoples.
But in my experience progress has been made when the powers that rule in the white world have been compelled to recognise that the rights of non-white peoples are founded in justice. It is then that forms of legal redress, which may not have existed before, have been devised.
For example, it used to be perfectly legal in Britain, only 25 years ago, for landlords or employers to put up notices which said "VACANCIES - NO COLOUREDS". Today any employer who discriminates on racial grounds can be required by a tribunal to pay compensation.
At an intentional level, apartheid in South Africa used to be regarded as an internal affair, however regrettable. But over the years apartheid became recognised as a crime against humanity and a threat to peace, so that international sanctions could be imposed.
This is not to say that the achievement of legal sanctions brings automatic justice. This has not happened either in Britain or South Africa. But these examples show that the demand for justice and legality is an essential element in the struggle for a just cause.
So it is with the claim for reparations. Indeed, once you accept, as I do, the truth of three propositions:
- that the mass kidnap and enslavement of Africans was the most wicked criminal enterprise in recorded human history;
- that no compensation was ever paid by any of the perpetrators to any of the sufferers;
- that the consequences of the crime continue to be massive, both in terms of the enrichment of the descendants of the perpetrators, and in terms of the impoverishment of Africa and the descendants of Africans,
then the justice of the claim for reparations is proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Those who may say that, that is all very true in theory but that in practice there is no mechanism to enforce the claim, or no willingness of the white world to recognise it, I would answer with a Latin legal maxim: ubi jus, ibi remedium: "where there is a right, there must be a remedy".
An injustice without a remedy is abhorred by nature. Once the claim is well-founded in legal principle, and well- recognised by the international community, remedies and mechanisms will be found.
Even so, given the unique, massive and multi-faceted nature of the claim, international jurists will be needed who can show corresponding creativity and imagination.
International law has never been static. New structures have often been devised to give effect to recognised principles. The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal is an example of new legal thinking which brought a measure of justice following the atrocities of Nazism. The International Court of Justice, where states could settle disputes with each other by law rather than by war, was unknown at the start of this century.
This paper is an attempt to conceptualise a legal framework for the formulation and prosecution of the claim for reparations.
It is argued by reference to seven fundamental propositions.
The charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal defined crimes against humanity in these words:
"Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population.... whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country here perpetrated."
The charter also gave jurisdiction to the Tribunal to try crimes against peace ("planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression..."), and War Crimes ("violation of the laws and customs of war... including murder, ill-treatment, or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of, or in, an occupied territory...")
It is considered by international lawyers that the Nuremberg Charter did not create new law, but declared and confirmed concepts of international criminality which had been accepted over centuries. As D.P. O'Connell puts it:
"The tribunal found that acts so reprehensible as to offend the conscience of mankind, directed against civilian populations, are crimes in international law".
In 1948, the United Nations promoted the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It has been ratified by most countries in the world. Again, the Convention has given a new legal form to an old concept in international law. The preamble to the Convention recognised that "genocide is a crime against international law", and that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity. Genocide was defined as:
- "Any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
- - Killing members of
the group;
- - Causing serious
bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- - Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part..."
Historians and their experts can show without difficulty how the invasion of African territories, the mass capture of Africans, the horrors of the middle passage, the "chattelisation" of Africans in the Americas, the extermination of the language and culture of the transported Africans, constituted violations of all these international laws.
The argument that such crimes were "legal" under European law, and accepted as normal by most Europeans, would be unavailing.
Europeans did not, then or now, constitute all mankind, and the conscience of all decent mankind must always have been outraged by the atrocities which Europeans inflicted on Africans over 400 years. Indeed it can be said that it was the ultimate crime against humanity, to deny human status to a vast section of humankind.
The right to reparation is well recognised in international law. It has been defined by the Permanent Court of International Justice (the predecessor of the International Court of Justice) in these terms: - "The essential
principle contained in the actual notion of an illegal act - a principle
which seems to be established by international practice and in
particular by the decisions of arbitral tribunals - is that reparation
must, as far as possible, wipe out all the consequences of the illegal
act and re-establish the situation which would, in all probability, have
existed if that act had not been committed.
"Restitution in kind or, if this is not possible, payment of a sum corresponding to the value which a restitution in kind would bear; the award, if need be, of damages for loss sustained which would not be covered by restitution in kind or payment in place of it - such are the principles which should serve to determine the amount of compensation due for an act contrary to international law."
The leading textbook on international law by Schwarzenberge described the recognition of the right to reparation as a process:
"International judicial institutions have slowly groped their way towards the articulate formulation of the rule that the commission of an international tort (wrong) entails the duty to make reparations."
Most of the case law on reparations concerns the compensation for specific losses such as the destruction of property, buildings, ships etc. But the principle is just as valid in the case of illegal actions on a larger scale which affect whole peoples. Indeed there are direct precedents for the payment of reparations in such cases:
- In 1952, Germany reached agreement with Israel for the payment of $222m, following a claim by Israel which was limited to the costs of resettling 500,000 Jews who had fled from Nazi controlled countries. Much later, in 1990, Austria made payments totalling $25m to survivors of the Jewish holocaust.
- A number of agreements have been made under the British Foreign Compensation Act of 1950; lump sum settlements were made by Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Egypt and Romania, and a tribunal was set up to make awards from the sums made available, so as to do justice to thousands of claimants whose property had been expropriated. A US-Iran Claims Tribunal was set up in 1981 for a similar purpose.
- Japan has made reparation payments to South Korea for acts committed during the period of invasion and occupation of Korea by Japan. Most recently, the United Nations Security Council has passed a resolution, binding in international law, requiring Iraq to pay reparations for its invasion of Kuwait.
It is therefore clear that the concept of reparations is firmly established and actively pursued by states, on behalf of their injured nationals, against other wrongdoing states.
In addition, one can identify a second category of reparations which is of great relevance. This is where a state has accepted the responsibility to make restitution, not just to other states, but to groups of people within its own borders whose rights had been violated.
In 1988 the United States Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which was designed to make restitution to Japanese-Americans in respect of losses brought about by "any discriminatory act of the US government...based upon the individual Japanese ancestry during the wartime period when Japanese Americans were interned in great numbers. A commission was set up to investigate claims. A total of $1.2 billion, or about $20,000 for each claimant, was paid. The Act began by stating the basis for reparations in clear terms which could be applied with the greatest relevance to the claims of African peoples:
"The purposes of this Act are to:
- - Acknowledge the
fundamental injustice of the evacuation, relocation and internment of US
citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry during World
War II;
- - Apologise on behalf of
the people of the US;
- - Make restitution to
those individuals of Japanese ancestry who were interned...
- - Make more credible
and sincere any declaration of concern by the US over violations of
human rights committed by other nations."
Some steps have been taken to recognise the rights to restitution of indigenous peoples whose land was plundered and occupied, and whose people were decimated, especially in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Each of these countries have made land rights settlements and/or financial payments to indigenous peoples.
These are woefully inadequate gestures, given the atrocities committed in those countries against indigenous peoples. But they represent some recognition that the surviving generations of indigenous peoples have the right to a measure of reparation for the crimes committed against their ancestors.
Whether the descendants of the immediate victims of a crime have a right to reparations, will depend on the nature of the claim being made. The US payments to Japanese Americans were aimed at making restitution for the suffering of those actually interned.
The Austrian payment was to survivors of the concentration camps, again to make reparation for the physical and mental agony of the concentration camps. If a victim died before the claim were agreed, his claim died with him, since the pain and suffering were personal to him.
But there are many cases where the consequences of the crime committed are visited upon descendants. Where property has been expropriated, the loss is suffered not merely by the then owner, but also by his descendants who have lost an inheritance which would otherwise have been theirs.
In such cases, international law gives a remedy, even if the claimant was not born at the time of the expropriation.
For example, the order made under the British Foreign Compensation Act of 1950 provided that the Foreign Compensation Commission should treat as established any claim relating to certain property in Egypt which had been sequestrated by the Nasser government if the applicant was the owner "or is the successor in title of such owner", making it plain that the children and the grandchildren of the original dispossessed owners were entitled to claim.
More recently, since the unification of Germany, claims have been pressed successfully by the sons and daughters of property owners whose lands were seized after the German Democratic Republic was set up. No one doubts their right to claim, even though they may have been children, or even unborn, when their families' land were taken over.
Claims have been made not only by descendants, but by the nation state which has had to bear the burden of paying for the consequences of the crime. As noted above, Israel successfully claimed reparations from West Germany for the costs of resettling Jewish refugees - even though the state of Israel did not exist at the time when the Nazi regime committed its crimes against the Jews.
It is also significant that West Germany, which felt obliged to meet the claim, was also a different state, territorially as well as politically, from the German Reich which was responsible for the atrocities.
In principle, therefore, the passage of time since slavery ended is no barrier to the claim of African peoples, provided that it can be proved that the consequences of the crime of slavery continue to manifest themselves to the prejudice of Africans now living in Africa and the Diaspora.
On this point, the evidence of historical experts is clear and unequivocal.
On the African continent, flourishing civilisations were destroyed; ordered systems of government were mashed up; millions of citizens were forcibly removed and a pattern of poverty and underdevelopment directly resulted, which now affects nearly every resident of Black Africa.
In the Americas, the slavery system gave rise to poverty, landlessness, underdevelopment, as well as to the crushing of culture and language, the loss of identity, the inculcation of inferiority among Black people, and the indoctrination of whites into a racist mindset - all of which continue to this day to affect the prospects and quality of black people's lives in the Caribbean, USA, Canada and Europe.
While there is no limitation period in international law, unreasonable delay could be a reason for refusing a claim. A state which had a just claim, but which failed to advance it over a long period, could be held to have acquiesced in the wrong or to have waived its right to claim reparations.
However, no objection along these lines could properly be made against the claim of Africa and Africans in the Diaspora.
In the case of Africa and the Caribbean region, the period of slavery and the slave trade was followed by the period of colonialism. It can be argued that colonialism itself was a crime in international law, for it was a usurpation, imposed by force, of the rights of the colonised peoples to their sovereignty. It was at the very least a crime against peace, and in most, if not all, colonised territories, crimes against humanity were frequently committed.
In the case of the United States, former slaves were subjected to a system of exclusion, separate development, racial persecution, civil rights denials and ghettoisation, which has only in part been overcome in the recent years following the civil rights movement.
The important point is that African peoples, until recently, had no independent voice, nor even any status in the world community. How could the people of, say, Ghana or Jamaica make a claim for reparations when their countries were considered to be an "overseas possession" of the very country whose people had kidnapped and enslaved their ancestors?
Still less were African-Americans as they struggled for the right to be recognised as citizens, in any position to make any claims - even if there was any international forum in which a claim could be brought, which there was not.
Even after the independence of African nations from colonialism, the shackles of neo-colonialism have fettered the power of African governments to speak with any real independence against their former conquerors. It is by no means unreasonable or surprising that it has taken some 30 years [now 40 years] since formal independence for a claim for reparations to be voiced.
Indeed I would argue that now, as never before, is the right time for this claim to be made, as African leaders are speaking with a new confidence and operating in new democratic structures.
So far I have been dealing with the legal basis for the reparations claim. The last four sections deal with questions which a legal analyst is bound to raise, however difficult it is to answer them:
- - Who are to be the
plaintiffs or claimants for reparations?
- - Who are to be the
defendants against whom the claim is made?
- - What are the damages to
be claimed?
- - In what court is
the claim to be made?
Here we sail into uncharted waters, since no claim for reparations of this magnitude has ever been brought. Hundreds of millions of people, in different continents of the world, have an interest in this claim. Their losses may seem almost impossible to quantify. Some minds are so daunted by the practical problems involved that they say the claim is unrealistic.
I do not hold any such defeatist view. Once the first three propositions are accepted as valid, and the right to reparations is seen to be soundly established in international law, then ways of doing justice can and will be found. Difficulties of scale or procedure should not be obstacles to justice. The unwillingness of the white world to consider the claim is not a reason for giving it up, but rather a spur to mobilising awareness and support around the issue.
However, in addressing these questions I seek to identify the principles involved, rather than to furnish precise answers, which can only be developed over time and experience, and after deep study.
Copyright (c) IC Publications Limited 1999. All rights reserved.
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- [BRC-NEWS] Did
Freedom Alone Pay a Nation's Debt? 27-11-99
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-11/23/057l-112399-idx.html
The Washington Post
Tuesday, November 23, 1999; Page C01
Did Freedom Alone Pay a Nation's Debt?
Rep. John Conyers Jr. Has a Question.
He's Willing to Wait A Long Time For the Right Answer.
By Kevin Merida, Staff Writer
The subject is scalding hot, untouchable as public policy. Even the brave run from it. And it is only a question:
Should the U.S. government pay reparations to the descendants of slaves?
"Just a question," says Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.)
-
worker-brc-news@lists.tao.ca
http://www.africalynx.com/icpubs/na/sep99/nacs0902.htm
New African
September 1999
Slavery: Africa's case
By Baffour Ankomah
A Ghanaian friend recently reminded me of how "history" basically means "HIS-story" - the story of the conqueror, not the vanquished. In Africa's case where oral (as against written) tradition has always been the norm, there is no written record of Africa's side of the slavery story. It has all been a one-sided story told through the eyes of the white man, a point finely put by Adam Hochschild in his recent book, King Leopold's Ghost.
"One problem, of course," Hochschild writes about the history of Congo, "is that nearly all of this vast river of words is by Europeans or Americans...and this inevitably skewed the way that history was recorded... Instead of African voices from this time, there is largely silence."
For example, the very important point of "what might have been" has been swept under the slavery carpet. If the Africans had not collaborated with the Europeans, what would have happened?
The answer is not far fetched. The record of European conquests around the world is enough indication.
First, there is unanimity among historians that the Portuguese who started the Transatlantic Slave Trade, used kidnapping as a way of getting their first African slaves.
Gomes Eannes de Zurara, the Portuguese chronicler attached to the court of the Portuguese king, Henry (the Navigator) wrote that the Portuguese first used "war on the blacks" in 1444 to capture the first slaves.
"[The Portuguese] shouting out 'St James, St George and Portugal', at once attacked [the Africans], killing and taking all they could," Zurara wrote. "Then might you see mothers forsaking their children, and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best as they could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts, others stowed their children among the sea weed, where our men found them afterwards."
In his 1997 book on the slave trade, Hugh Thomas records correctly that, "West Africa had known slavery on a small scale before the coming of Islam", and before the coming of the Europeans. Hochschild even puts it better.
"The nature of African slavery [before the arrival of the Europeans]," he writes, "varied from area to another and changed over time, but most slaves were people captured in warfare. Others had been criminals or debtors, or were given away by their families as part of a dowry settlement...In other ways, African slavery was more flexible and benign than the system Europeans would soon establish in the New World. Over a generation or two, slaves could often earn or be granted their freedom, and free people and slaves sometimes inter-married."
The Africans never sold their slaves as "commercial items" until the arrival of the Arabs, and later Europeans. For the Africans to change their mind and "sell" slaves on the huge scale as we see in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, means something dramatic happened to their mind-set.
Zurara chronicled that from 1444 onwards, the "Portuguese caravels, sometimes four, sometimes more, used to come to the Gulf of Arguin [in modern day Mauritania] well armed, and, landing by night, surprised some fishermen's villages".
Over time, the Africans decided to fight back and defend themselves "with considerable intelligence", and inflicted heavy casualties on the Portuguese.
As their losses increased, Henry (the 'Navigator', the first in the line of European monarchs to benefit greatly from slavery), ordered his men to change tactics. Instead of seizing the Africans by force, they would now "buy" them.
"A captain named Joao Fernandes apparently initiated this change, on the explicit orders of King Henry", writes Hugh Thomas. "He offered to stay on the coast of the Bay of Arguin in 1445 in order to gather information, in temporary exchange for an old leader of the region. Fernandes did remain in Africa for a year, [and] won over the local people..."
Notice Hugh Thomas' use of "won over". You "win over" somebody when you gain his support or consent. The first move always comes from the one trying to "win over" the other. In the case of slavery, the Europeans used bribery and deceit to "win over" the Africans to "sell their own people". In modern parlance, one would say they took advantage of the na_ve African kings, as they still do with modern African leaders.
In any case, if the Africans had not succumbed to the wiles of the Europeans, they (the Europeans) would have used their superior guns to subdue the Africans anyway, as they did during the years of colonialisation. The record is there.
For example, when the Asantes in Ghana refused to come under British rule, Britain fought a series of wars (1873-74) to subdue the Asantes (finally in 1900). The Asantes succumbed not because they now wanted British rule, but because Britain's superior firepower overcame them. Britain used force!
An African-American archaeologist, Theresa Singleton, who worked at a site in Elmina (Ghana) in the early 1990s, wrote recently: "In 1873, the Asantes marched toward the coast to confront the British invaders. To stop the Asantes and their allies - the Fantes inhabitants of Elmina - the British bombarded the town of Elmina from the ramparts of Elmina Castle and destroyed it. The part of the town immediately adjacent to the fortress was never rebuilt, and has been the focus of archaeological research since 1985."
So, in effect, if the Africans had not "sold their own people," the Europeans would have used superior force to get the slaves anyway. Records show that before 1950, what the Europeans wanted anywhere in the world, the Europeans got it; first by stealth and deceit, and that failing, by force.
Take the Americas (especially USA, Canada, and Brazil), the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, (even South Africa and Zimbabwe) - the Europeans just seized the land by wiping out the native people (sometimes poisoning their waterholes or giving them "gifts" of poisoned blankets as they did in America). The natives who were fortunate not to be killed, were carted into "reservations" where they still live in America and elsewhere.
So, in a way, one can say with some qualification, that it was somewhat a "blessing" that the Africans collaborated with the European slavers. The alternative would have been total catastrophe, a complete extermination of our people and seizure of our land as happened in the Americas, Australia New Zealand etc, and as the Germans tried to do in Namibia, where they wiped out nearly 70% of the Herero people between 1887 and 1907. Or as Belgium's "philanthropic" king, Leopold II, did in Congo where between three and five million Congolese were killed by Leopold's agents between 1890 and 1910.
Today, neither Germany nor Belgium is offering any compensation for killing these African people in Namibia and Congo, yet Germany is happy paying compensation to the Jews.
Therefore, the modern excuse that Africans "sold their own people", and, thus, do not deserve reparations, is neither here nor there. The Europeans would have had their way, anyway.
Then comes the vexing question often asked by both white and black anti-reparationists: Who is to receive compensation? And how much is human life worth?
The answer is simple. How much are they paying to the Jews? It's just a simple matter of multiplication.
And who should receive it? They know where they "bought" the slaves! They know where the descendants and heirs of the slaves live. And this must be paid by both the Arab and Western former slaving nations.
Another very important bit of slavery swept under the carpet is the "disappearance" of the descendants of African slaves in Europe and Arabia. Where did they go? At least, in the New World one can point to the offspring of the African slaves.
The Arabs were the first, and last, to take African slaves out of the continent, long before the Europeans arrived and long before abolition in 1870. But today we don't see any large concentrations of blacks in Arabia.
Similarly, the first millions of Africans enslaved by Europeans were taken north into Europe. It was not until 1530 that King Joao III of Portugal (he of Congo) agreed that slaves could be shipped directly from Africa to the Americas. So, where are the descendants of the African slaves shipped into Europe between 1440 and 1530?
Records show that some were shipped down to the New World. But not all.
In Britain (which became the biggest slaving nation), the lie is often told how black people started coming to the "mother country" in large numbers only after World War II. So where did the descendants of the African slaves shipped to Britain, go?
The same question can be asked of Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, The Netherlands and Switzerland (even Switzerland!).
In the 1780s, Jacques Necker, a Swiss economist who had recently been dismissed as minister did a study of Switerland's finances, and wrote a pamphlet denouncing Swiss hypocrisy: "How we preach humanity yet go every year to bind in chains 20,000 natives of Africa," Necker wrote. Historians record that his pamphlet sold like hot potato - 24,000 copies in a very short time.
In the case of Britain, Peter Fryer reveals in his 1988 book, Black People in the British Empire, that black "presence [in Britain] goes back some 2,000 years and has been continuous since the beginning of the 16th century or earlier".
Gretchen Gerzina, in her brilliant book, Black England, published in 1995, adds that: "By 1596, there were so many black people in England that Queen Elizabeth I [who herself participated in the slave trade and benefited greatly from it] issued an edict demanding that they leave.
"At that time, slaves provided a lifetime of wageless labour for the cost of the initial purchase, and increased the status of the owner. Alarmed that they might be taking jobs and goods away from English citizens... the Queen issued another ineffectual edict, then finally commissioned a Lubeck merchant, Casper van Senden, to cart them off in 1601."
Some of them were shipped out to the New World. But not all. As Gerzina's research showed, 167 years after Queen Elizabeth had shipped out the Africans, "in 1768 Granville Sharp and others put the number of black servants in London [alone] at 20,000, out of a total London population of 676,250." So where are the descendants of these African "servants"?
Hugh Thomas tells how in 1799, the then British prime minister, William Pitt (a great abolitionist himself) had taunted the anti-abolitionists during a debate in the House of Commons: "On this occasion," Thomas reveals, "[Pitt] said ironically that the opponents of abolition evidently thought that 'the blood of these poor negroes was to continue flowing; it was dangerous to stop it because it had run so long; besides, we were under contract with certain surgeons to allow them a certain supply of human bodies every year for them to try experiments on, and this we did out of pure love of science'."
There is the rub! The Africans were used for medical experiments by European surgeons! But surely not all of them disappeared under the surgeons' knives? So where are their offspring?
All said and done, nobody gets reparations paid to him on a silver plate. To this day, Africa has done almost nothing about this matter. Bernie Grant, the Labour MP in London, laments the striking indifference of African leaders in the matter. "But I'm not waiting for [them]", he says. "I just carry on with what I'm doing. Because the issue at stake is more important than that. It's to do with the people of African descent, and not necessarily the people from Africa."
Copyright (c) IC Publications Limited 1999. All rights reserved.
[Articles on BRC-NEWS may be forwarded and posted on other mailing lists/discussion forums, as long as proper attribution is given to the author and originating publication, and the wording is not altered in any way. In particular, if there is a reference to a web site where an article was originally located, please do not remove that.
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- ABA Network
American Bar Association
COVER STORY / CIVIL RIGHTS LAW
Repairing the Past
Demands are growing for reparations for the descendants of African slaves in America. How the issue is resolved may be key to this country's continuing search for racial harmony.
BY JEFFREY GHANNAM
For years, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall pored over handwritten French, Spanish and English slave documents in a massive effort to document Afro-Louisiana history.
With stunning authority, she untangled a history of African slave names, genders, ages, occupations, illnesses, family relationships, ethnicity, places of origin, prices paid by slave owners, slaves' testimony and emancipations.
A few mouse clicks provide computer access to the product of Hall's work, Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy 1699-1860. The CD-ROM from Louisiana State University Press, which she edited, offers insight into the inhumanity of slavery.
"Look, this is unique and it shows which masters owned which slaves and how much they cost," says Hall, a former Rutgers University history professor who is now a researcher and writer in New Orleans. "And there is a way of calculating precisely which fortunes were made by which families."
As she worked compiling the records, Hall came to the realization that her work could have implications far beyond adding to the historical portrait of slavery. The documents also provide a factual basis that may give rise to legal claims for reparations by the descendants of Louisiana's African slaves.
"I started it for my own purposes as a historian," Hall says. "As time went by, I realized that this does have implications for the reparations issue."
In the growing debate over whether African-Americans are entitled to some form of redress for the wrongs committed against their ancestors who were brought to America as slaves, Hall's databases will figure prominently. The issue gains added urgency as time goes by and the documents become more scarce.
To the activists, lawyers and politicians who are laying the moral, legal and political groundwork on the issue, reparations can mean many things. Some want an apology for the 246-year practice of slavery in America. Some propose a presidential commission to inquire into the need and extent of possible monetary relief, while others want corporations to make restitution for helping to maintain slavery.
Those waging the campaign for reparations or restitution, depending upon what is being sought, have been documenting, strategizing and promoting the cause on a national basis.
Earlier this year, Chicago became the fifth major U.S. city to endorse federal hearings on reparations. Other cities are considering or have paid reparations in connection with race riots in the past. In Africa last year, Benin and Ghana apologized for their nations' historic roles in the slave trade.
A simple resolution of the reparations question is not expected. Those who press the issue build on black efforts for recompense that began soon after the Civil War ended. They also look to the precedents of legislative recompense and legal settlements for other ethnic, religious and racial minorities around the world.
- Setting a Precedent
The activists point to the example of Japanese-Americans, interned during World War II, who received an apology and compensation from the U.S. government in 1988. They note that Holocaust survivors will receive billions of dollars in settlements paid by the Germans and the Swiss.
They argue that the United States owes African-Americans for their ancestors' vast contributions to building the nation's public and private wealth, as well as for the legacy of discrimination that persists despite constitutional and legislative attempts to eliminate it.
But can the Holocaust settlements be a model for African-American reparations?
"Yes and no," says Michael Hausfeld, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who has handled Holocaust litigation. "Yes, with respect to part of what was sought was a historical reckoning and acknowledgment that an offense against humanity was committed, and that there were victims of that offense who received no justice."
No, he says, in that Holocaust settlements were brought on behalf of direct survivors - the actual victims.
"To that extent, there is a greater proximity of the wrong to the individual," Hausfeld says. "When you have many generations from the offense it becomes almost impossible to fashion an appropriate remedy as a relief."
Hausfeld says that the challenge with African-Americans' reparations claims is the inability to translate the true nature of the injury into damages suffered.
"In my judgment, you can never equate a precise calculated amount for being enslaved," he says. "To say, `Here's $4.20 that you would have earned,' 100 years later, it really diminishes what had occurred."
But that does not necessarily make the moral wrong any less real, even for those who cannot trace their ancestry directly back to slaves.
Moreover, Hausfeld says, sources like Hall's databases confront those who have yet to acknowledge their roles in contributing to the system of slavery.
"Even if it can't be reduced to a calculable form of compensation," Hausfeld says, "the fact that you have such a large body of identifiable entities that have escaped any accountability is a poor message for morality and inhumanity in the future."
To Randall Robinson, the impact of slavery persists to this day. In a book published earlier this year, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, he writes that Europe and America inflicted unimaginable horrors on Africa and its people. Europe not only paid no compensation to Africa but went on to remap the continent for economic exploitation.
"It is a human rights crime without parallel in the modern world," writes Robinson, founder and president of TransAfrica, a lobbying group based in Washington, D.C. "For it produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended."
Robinson, whose book has informed the dialogue on African-American reparations, writes that he knows of no statute of limitations-either legal or moral-that would extinguish claims.
"Until America's white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive, unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people," he writes. "Questions must be raised to American private, as well as public, institutions. Which American families and institutions, for instance, were endowed in perpetuity by the commerce of slavery? What is a fair measure of restitution for this, the most important of all American human rights abuses?"
Like other reparations proponents, Robinson advances the legal theory of unjust enrichment to seek recovery for the benefits slave laborers bestowed on the nation. That theory is upheld by international law, he says.
Robinson notes in his book that President Lincoln supported a plan during the Civil War to compensate slave owners for their loss of "property." But his successor, President Andrew Johnson, vetoed legislation that would have compensated ex-slaves, as well.
There would be no 40 acres and no mule.
Troubling Trail
Tracing the harm to individuals may be impossible for many African-Americans outside of Hall's databases. Still, some succeed.
Building a case for reparations was not Percy Pierre's intent when he set out to trace his ancestry 20 years ago. Coming from a close-knit family, he says, it was important to rediscover his history.
Pierre of East Lansing, Mich., used Hall's databases to discover an ancestor who hailed from Mozambique. She was the grandmother of a great-great-grandfather, a slave in Louisiana who took the sur- name Pierre.
"I could lay it out as a legal argument," says Pierre, a professor of electrical engineering at Michigan State University who grew up in Louisiana. "If I want to go back and document unpaid labor by my ancestors, I can."
For two years, he devoted two days a week to tracing his ancestry to his great-great-grandfather. "I can document who owned him, how long he was a slave," Pierre says. "I can produce papers where a value was put on him as a slave. I can do that for probably 20 of my ancestors, and I can identify the families who owned them. I can identify their descendants. I can trace their property, what happened to their plantation. It's doable. I'm absolutely sure."
Building a link to his family past remains key to Pierre's efforts. "On a personal level, that's what it's about," he says. "It's about family." But the legal dimension exists. "It's there."
Tracing the money is key for Richard America, a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who says there should be an accounting of what was taken from African-Americans.
"Slavery and discrimination were mechanisms for transferring money wrongfully" from blacks to whites, says America, author of a forthcoming book, Solving the Race Problem. "So reparations are a way of capturing the unjust enrichment that whites have today."
He advocates public policies redirecting that wealth to blacks in the form of grants for housing, businesses and education. "Money was taken away," America says. "That's the heart of the problem in a nutshell."
Many in the pro-reparations camp believe the United States is a country willing to make amends.
"Many of us work hard to make it clear that we do not deny that reparations should have been paid to Japanese-Americans," says Adjoa Aiyetoro, legal counsel for the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. Based in Washington, D.C., N'COBRA is an umbrella for more than two dozen groups seeking to advance the campaign for reparations.
"We don't want to get into a competitive thing-`Why them and not us?' " Aiyetoro says. "It underscores that reparations are a legitimate form of remedy. It shows the United States recognizes the issue."
Aiyetoro notes that N'COBRA helped move the reparations issue into the mainstream in the early 1990s.
Among those advancing the cause are black intellectuals, including Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree, who admits to publicly joining an effort only recently that grassroots activists initiated decades ago.
Ogletree is coordinating a national effort to study legal strategies and legislative alternatives to support reparations. Specifically, he wants to address "the consistent and deep-seated problems we have in terms of health care, employment and housing."
But he adds that the inquiry is in its early stages and must consider many points of view on the issue.
International Approach
Robert Brock, a Washington, D.C., legal activist for 45 years and president of the Self Determination Committee, a reparations lobbying group, has been thinking about the issue for a long time. He argues that international law provides a basis for claims to reparations because blacks were brought to these shores in captivity, and that their legal claims survive the passage of time.
"I trace it all the way to the first act," he says. "You have to have a war before you capture me. War is an international act, isn't it? Slavery is an international act, isn't it? Captivity is an international act over the high seas three miles out of African territory.
"Blacks touched the United States by being brought here without a passport, immigration papers and consent," Brock says. "But they were brought over the ocean, which is admiralty law. Admiralty law is international law. Blacks' rights lie in international law."
Brock argues that the war against African slaves and their descendants ended with passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865. So before the 100-year anniversary of the amendment, he filed a class action complaint against the United States in Los Angeles federal court. He sought reparations and $500,000 in damages, plus interest, for each African-American.
"I did that with the effect of stopping the statute of limitations," Brock maintains. "How many people know about that? Very few. Now their right to get reparations for slave labor is continued."
The government never responded, he says.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has introduced a bill in the House each year since 1989 calling for the president to appoint a commission to study reparations.
"We're not trying to strike a `who had slaves and who did not' " inquiry, Conyers says. "You have a problem that cries out across history for some kind of enlightened and compassionate resolution. What I'm trying to do is make this a healing, to get the past behind us. This matter is not going to be whisked away."
If created, the commission would seek answers to fundamental questions: Is an apology due? Should reparations be paid? To whom and in what form? The bill, H.R. 40, which has limited bipartisan support, languishes in the House Judiciary Committee.
"People say it's too late or costs too much," Conyers says. "Some suggest that we're taking the victims' approach. But, of course, we already are victims. We're not approaching it as victims. We seek justice, and we're trying to figure out how to do it."
He says the Holocaust settlements are proof that the African-American appeal is backed by legal and moral authority, that reparations aren't some extra-legal remedy that belongs to the past but a process that is the usual means to resolve harms done by a nation against a people.
When Rep. Tony P. Hall, D-Ohio introduced in June the Apology for Slavery Resolution of 2000, H. Con. Res. 356, he told reporters that apologizing is humbling. "These three words-`I am sorry'-are a foundation for beginning again, a small price to pay for restoring lost trust, and a necessary first step in moving forward constructively."
Hall says the apology would build on the precedents that Congress set when it apologized to Japanese-Americans and to Native Hawaiians for the role the United States played in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii in the 1890s. An apology would constitute official government policy.
Like Conyers' bill, Hall's calls for a commission to study slavery's legacy, and it supports a national museum and memorial, which are included in similar proposals by Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Cliff Stearns, R-Fla.
And, also like Conyers' bill, Hall's resolution sits in the House Judiciary Committee. "No hearings. No vote. No nothing," says Max Finberg, Hall's legislative assistant. "That tells us it's probably not going anywhere."
Deadria Farmer-Paellmann of New York City also has encountered frustrations in a campaign for justice. Her efforts rest on the theory that some corporations should make restitution to African-Americans for their roles in maintaining slave labor.
Farmer-Paellmann, a graduate of New England School of Law in Boston, began her law studies with the intention of finding a case for reparations. She says she is close. In the meantime, she is targeting companies that benefited from slavery. An economy supported by slave labor helped companies prosper, and restitution can be claimed based on unjust enrichment, she says.
"Once all is said and done, you will see a list of companies that touch on every aspect of corporate life in America," she says. "Americans of all races will be more educated about what slaves did for this country. We were there in every aspect of American business life."
Farmer-Paellmann has so far approached Aetna, the Hartford, Conn.-based insurance giant, and asked for an apology for its role in helping to maintain slavery by writing life insurance policies on slaves with their owners as beneficiaries.
Aetna apologized for writing what it says were five slave policies just after the company's 1853 founding, says spokesman Fred Laberge. The policies covered short periods of time, such as planting season. "In the year 2000, it sounds terrible to have done something like that," Laberge says. "Today we express our regret at being a part of this."
But Aetna plans no further action, he says. The company addresses today's needs, he says, with a minority internship program, corporate scholarship funding and diversity initiatives. "The company has a track record of being a very diverse, open place today."
But Farmer-Paellmann is not satisfied. "Their diversity policy has a lot to do with the fact that they needed one, and the charitable programs still do not address the debts that they owe," she says. "They're giving gifts; they're not paying a debt."
She would like to see, for instance, the creation of a trust to help descendants of African slaves establish their own businesses. "The idea is to become a part of the business world in America," she says. "I'm looking for us to not have to rely on programs and to become more economically independent."
Ambivalence that cuts across racial lines hovers over the reparations issue.
Reaction from the white community, according to legislative assistant Finberg, includes views that the civil rights movement and desegregation resolved issues of inequality. A common refrain is that many blacks are successful in business, entertainment and sports.
Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, did not return phone calls seeking comment on the reparations issue. But several years ago, he said, "I never owned a slave. I never oppressed anybody. I don't know that I should have to pay for someone who did [own slaves] generations before I was born."
Ambivalent Attitudes
Many in the African-American community have not taken a position on reparations. They wonder whether an apology would be enough and whether it would be meaningless without reparations. Many refuse to get their hopes up for either.
The Rev. Carl Baldwin of Godian Fellowship Mission in New York City is the grandson of a slave. He has been an activist since his days in Birmingham, Ala., where he took part in some of the early civil rights sit-ins. He supports reparations but doesn't expect to see them in his lifetime. "There are those who say we should get millions," Baldwin says of his parishioners. "There are those who say we should let it drop."
Finberg says he has heard from various sides in the debate and believes some members of the black community are not ready to forgive whites for slavery. "And letting them off for all the offenses that have been heaped upon [the black community] with a simple apology" doesn't cut it, Finberg says. Meanwhile, many black members of Congress have shied away from the idea of an apology, he says. "They have a lot of battles to fight in overcoming racial discrimination, and it's not one that they choose to invest their energy in."
Pierre wants acknowledgment for contributions blacks made during slavery. He points to Southern plantations that inform tourists about the lives of the owners but fail to reveal the stories of the slaves who built and supported the estates. "My attitude is that we should not forget that," he says. "We ought to tell that story."
Finberg says Rep. Hall does not support government-paid cash reparations for every African-American "at this stage." Instead, he supports building a museum to address the historical record and developing school curriculums to more accurately discuss slavery.
To Ogletree, "The idea is not to build a monument or get a check but to change the quality of care of those who are still suffering from centuries-old problems of segregation, bigotry and lack of meaningful opportunity."
He finds the idea of individual monetary restitution in the form of checks sent to African-Americans "a cheap form of forgiveness and an insult to those millions of Africans who lost their lives to the slave trade."
But whatever final form reparations might take, conviction is growing that the campaign cannot let up.
"You have to plug along and make it an issue that people cannot ignore," says activist Aiyetoro. "Until and unless this country and its leadership and its people deal straight up with actually making reparations, we're not going to have racial healing."
Jeffrey Ghannam is a legal affairs writer for the ABA Journal. His e-mail address is ghannamj@staff.abanet.org.
- March 2, 2001
Riding the Reparations Bandwagon:
A White Woman's Perspective
By Molly Secours <mollmaud@telalink.net> msecours@oasiscenter.org
I admit it. I, a middle aged white woman, have jumped on the
Reparations "band wagon". When I was asked several years ago
if I thought reparations for the enslavement of African
Americans were in order, I stammered and shuffled my feet
and said, "it depends". A safe response for a liberally
minded white woman who had absolutely no idea what I was
really being asked.. Like so many other whites (and people
of color) I thought reparations was only (and all) about
money. I thought reparations meant someone tossing out an
arbitrary number and someone else (the government) writing a
check and that was that.
This is exactly why most white people who hear and/or read
about the Reparations movement get nervous and defensive and
respond with one of several classic objections:
1) "I didn't have slaves, nor did my family benefit from
slavery."
2) "Slavery hasn't existed for over 140 years, why do we
have to pay for something that happened then."
3) "Blacks have been getting preferential treatment for
years and frankly I'm tired of it."
4) "It is only going to divide us more."
There are of course dozens of other responses but these seem
to be four of the most popular and the most worthy of
addressing in such a brief article.
First of all Reparations is not a recent notion nor is it
something born out of the 60's civil rights movement.
Reparations advocates (both black and white) have been
around for over 100 years. Reparations is a verb and not a
noun. The movement is a process of exploring the damages
inflicted upon the descendants of those who were kidnapped
and held captive in the United States throughout a period of
several hundred years and dialoguing about potential
compensatory remedies. Also included in this exploration are
all the corporations and governmental organizations who
benefited from the slave industry and who are prosperous
today because of their practices.
No one would argue that receiving an inheritance from a
relative might affect what kind of future one might have.
African Americans have inherited the injustices inflicted
upon their ancestors and are living with them today in
various forms. For those who are not educated about our
American history, it is tempting to view the few civil
rights laws and affirmative action programs of the last 30
years as remedies for several hundred years of hatred,
mistreatment and oppression.
As Congressman John Conyers pointed out at the Race
Relations Institute Conference on Reparations in Nashville
in February, those who are promoting reparations on the
governmental level are (at this point) only requesting a
study of the damages. These damages are not limited to
money, and frankly, there is not a dollar figure large
enough that could provide healing and justice for all the
victims of the legacy of slavery. And, it is not even
concluded that money will be the end result of reparations.
So far the government has refused to support a study. This
does not mean studies are not being done, just that the
government refuses to acknowledge them.
It is telling that many Americans don't object to billions
of dollars being spent on strategic air missile defense
systems -- which don't even work or the money spent on the
studies which examine why they don't work. And yet, many
white Americans vehemently object to a study of Reparations
-- something that could specifically identify the injustices
heaped upon our African brothers and sisters which have had
lingering effects. A study of Reparations is a study of our
history and something that could help promote racial healing
and justice for blacks and whites alike.
In regards to one of the primary objections, my family
didn't have to own slaves in order for me to benefit from
slavery. As a white woman I have enjoyed first class
privileges my entire life and I do not come from an upper
middle-class family. In fact I have never forgotten the
shame of seeing my mother pay for groceries with food-stamps
when our family was destroyed. But regardless of my economic
status, I was (and am now) the recipient of numerous
invisible advantages every day. I never knew what those
advantages were or meant until I started working with those
who dealt with discrimination and oppression all of their
lives. As a white person, understanding the insidious nature
of racism was an effort to educate myself because it had no
bearing on my everyday life. I couldn't see it so it didn't
exist for me. I had to open my mind in order to see that
racial discrimination is a stain in the fabric or our
American culture. I'm not just referring to the obvious
kinds of racial injustices but all the subtleties that keep
people of color enslaved -- today.
As far as blacks receiving preferential treatment they most
certainly do. Blacks and other people of color are preferred
targets of the police and other law enforcement officials.
People of color are certainly recipients of preferential
treatment in our criminal justice system as is evidenced by
the fact that they receive longer sentences for the same
crimes committed by whites. It is certainly preferable to
many white owned financial institutions to deny home loans
to people of color in particular neighborhoods where whites
are the majority.
A cursory study of the criminal justice system will support
these allegations in black and white. When we look at the
figures of who is in prison and we realize that there were
few (if any) prisons in America during slavery we must ask
ourselves some honest questions. Why are American prisons
one of the fastest growing businesses in this country? Is it
possible that our prison system has replaced slavery on some
level? Are black men (and women) less threatening when they
are held captive in controlled environments? These are all
very complicated questions that are relevant to the issue of
reparations and in need of consideration.
I'm most fascinated when I hear someone suggest that
reparations will only serve to further divide the races and
therefore should be abandoned. I can think of nothing more
divisive than what has already been done to African
Americans in this country. Are white Americans honestly
convinced that race relations are so good now that we don't
want to jeopardize them?
Learning about and acknowledging anothers oppression does
not take anything away from me. If anything, I have
benefited enormously from re-visiting history and making
connections between the historical truths and contemporary
social ills. I've also learned a great deal from those who
have been brave enough to tell their stories. This is
another reason I believe so strongly in the Reparations
movement. The road to healing race relations is the process
of discovery and listening. When whites and blacks join
together to look truthfully at the past and jointly explore
what the damages were (and are) to those of African descent,
it is clear that money is not the only solution. Healing can
occur in many forms and no one -- so far that I know -- is
suggesting that money is the total solution.
After hearing some preliminary figures of how much the U.S.
government profited from taxing the slave trade (it's not
that far from George W's proposed tax cut ironically) I
personally believe that a check of some kind must be
written. But again, it is only part of the solution.
We whites need healing too. Otherwise we wouldn't get so
angry when we hear the words reparations or compensatory
remedies. It's not the words that cause such a violent
reaction in some, it is something much deeper that we must
address. Our own fear, hatred and anger has done a number on
us whites.. It has made us arrogant. And our arrogance is
just a by-product of our ignorance -- which fortunately can
be remedied if we can stop blaming the victims long enough
to seek the truth.
It is often our arrogance that prompts us to dismiss (out of
hand) the idea of reparations. We have been in the driver's
seat for so long that we can't abide the notion that someone
else might have another route worth exploring.. I say let's
scoot over to the passengers seat and ride the Reparations
band-wagon. No one knows where we will end up but we will at
least end up there together -- which is better than where we
are right now.
--
Molly Secours is a writer, counselor, speaker and racial dialog facilitator in Nashville TN. She can be reached at mollmaud@earthlink.net or msecours@oasiscenter.orgCopyright (c) 2001 Molly Secours. All Rights Reserved.
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Ernest Allen and Robert Chrisman offer Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz
April
2, 2001
Ten
Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz
By
Robert Chrisman <blkschlr@aol.com>
and
Ernest
Allen, Jr. <eallen@afroam.umass.edu>
David
Horowitz's article, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for
Slavery
is a Bad Idea and Racist Too," recently achieved
circulation
in a handful of college newspapers throughout
the
United States as a paid advertisement sponsored by the
Center
for the Study of Popular Culture. While Horowitz's
article
pretends to address the issues of reparations, it is
not
about reparations at all. It is, rather, a well-heeled,
coordinated
attack on Black Americans which is calculated to
elicit
division and strife. Horowitz reportedly attempted to
place
his article in some 50 student newspapers at
universities
and colleges across the country, and was
successful
in purchasing space in such newspapers at Brown,
Duke,
Arizona, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, University of Chicago,
and
University of Wisconsin, paying an average of $700 per
paper.
His campaign has succeeded in fomenting outrage,
dissension,
and grief wherever it has appeared.
Unfortunately,
both its supporters and its foes too often
have
categorized the issue as one centering on "free
speech."
The sale and purchase of advertising space is not a
matter
of free speech, however, but involves an exchange of
commodities.
Professor Lewis Gordon of Brown University put
it
very well, saying that "what concerned me was that the ad
was
both hate speech and a solicitation for financial
support
to develop antiblack ad space. I was concerned that
it
would embolden white supremacists and antiblack racists."
At
a March 15 panel held at UC Berkeley, Horowitz also
conceded
that his paid advertisement did not constitute a
free
speech issue.
As
one examines the text of Horowitz's article, it becomes
apparent
that it is not a reasoned essay addressed to the
topic
of reparations: it is, rather, a racist polemic
against
African Americans and Africans that is neither
responsible
nor informed, relying heavily upon sophistry and
a
Hitlerian "Big Lie" technique. To our knowledge, only one
of
Horowitz's ten "reasons" has been challenged by a black
scholar
as to source, accuracy, and validity. It is our
intention
here to briefly rebut his slanders in order to
pave
the way for an honest and forthright debate on
reparations.
In these efforts we focus not just on slavery,
but
also the legacy of slavery which continues to inform
institutional
as well as individual behavior in the U.S. to
this
day. Although we recognize that white America still
owes
a debt to the descendants of slaves, in addressing
Horowitz's
distortions of history we do not act as advocates
for
a specific form of reparations.
1.
There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The
Crime
Of Slavery
Horowitz's
first argument, relativist in structure, can only
lead
to two conclusions: 1) societies are not responsible
for
their actions and 2) since "everyone" was responsible
for
slavery, no one was responsible. While diverse groups on
different
continents certainly participated in the trade,
the
principal responsibility for internationalization of
that
trade and the institutionalization of slavery in the
so-called
New World rests with European and American
individuals
and institutions. The transatlantic slave trade
began
with the importation of African slaves into Hispaniola
by
Spain in the early 1500s. Nationals of France, England,
Portugal,
and the Netherlands, supported by their respective
governments
and powerful religious institutions, quickly
entered
the trade and extracted their pieces of silver as
well.
By conservative estimates, 14 million enslaved
Africans
survived the horror of the Middle Passage for the
purpose
of producing wealth for Europeans and Euro-Americans
in
the New World.
While
there is some evidence of blacks owning slaves for
profit
purposes -- most notably the creole caste in
Louisiana
-- the numbers were small. As historian James
Oakes
noted, "By 1830 there were some 3,775 free black
slaveholders
across the South. . . . The evidence is
overwhelming
that the vast majority of black slaveholders
were
free men who purchased members of their families or who
acted
out of benevolence." (Oakes, 47-48.)
2.
There Is No Single Group That Benefited Exclusively From
Slavery
Horowitz's
second point, which is also a relativist one,
seeks
to dismiss the argument that white Americans benefited
as
a group from slavery, contending that the material
benefits
of slavery could not accrue in an exclusive way to
a
single group. But such sophistry evades the basic issue:
who
benefited primarily from slavery? Those who were
responsible
for the institutionalized enslavement of people
of
African descent also received the primary benefits from
such
actions. New England slave traders, merchants, bankers,
and
insurance companies all profited from the slave trade,
which
required a wide variety of commodities ranging from
sails,
chandlery, foodstuffs, and guns, to cloth goods and
other
items for trading purposes. Both prior to and after
the
American Revolution, slaveholding was a principal path
for
white upward mobility in the South. The white
native-born
as well as immigrant groups such as Germans,
Scots-Irish,
and the like participated. In 1860, cotton was
the
country's largest single export. As Eric Williams and
C.L.R.
James have demonstrated, the free labor provided by
slavery
was central to the growth of industry in western
Europe
and the United States; simultaneously, as Walter
Rodney
has argued, slavery depressed and destabilized the
economies
of African states. Slaveholders benefited
primarily
from the institution, of course, and generally in
proportion
to the number of slaves which they held. But the
sharing
of the proceeds of slave exploitation spilled across
class
lines within white communities as well.
As
historian John Hope Franklin recently affirmed in a
rebuttal
to Horowitz's claims:
"All
whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery.
All
blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own.
All
whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves,
were
not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion
over
all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of
control."
"If
David Horowitz had read James D. DeBow's "The Interest
in
Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder," he would not
have
blundered into the fantasy of claiming that no single
group
benefited from slavery. Planters did, of course. New
York
merchants did, of course. Even poor whites benefited
from
the legal advantage they enjoyed over all blacks as
well
as from the psychological advantage of having a group
beneath
them."
The
context of the African-American argument for reparations
is
confined to the practice and consequences of slavery
within
the United States, from the colonial period on
through
final abolition and the aftermath, circa 1619-1865.
Contrary
to Horowitz's assertion, there is no record of
institutionalized
white enslavement in colonial America.
Horowitz
is confusing the indenture of white labor, which
usually
lasted seven years or so during the early colonial
period,
with enslavement. African slavery was expanded, in
fact,
to replace the inefficient and unenforceable white
indenture
system. (Smith)
Seeking
to claim that African Americans, too, have benefited
from
slavery, Horowitz points to the relative prosperity of
African
Americans in comparison to their counterparts on the
African
continent. However, his argument that, "the GNP of
black
America makes the African-American community the 10th
most
prosperous "nation" in the world is based upon a false
analogy.
GNP is defined as "the total market value of all
the
goods and services produced by a nation during a
specified
period." Black Americans are not a nation and have
no
GNP. Horowitz confuses disposable income and "consumer
power"
with the generation of wealth.
3.
Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned
Slaves,
And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them
Most
white union troops were drafted into the union army in
a
war which the federal government initially defined as a
"war
to preserve the union." In large part because they
feared
that freed slaves would flee the South and "take
their
jobs" while they themselves were engaged in warfare
with
Confederate troops, recently drafted white conscripts
in
New York City and elsewhere rioted during the summer of
1863,
taking a heavy toll on black civilian life and
property.
Too many instances can be cited where white
northern
troops plundered the personal property of slaves,
appropriating
their bedding, chickens, pigs, and foodstuffs
as
they swept through the South. On the other hand, it is
certainly
true that there also existed principled white
commanders
and troops who were committed abolitionists.
However,
Horowitz's focus on what he mistakenly considers to
be
the overriding, benevolent aim of white union troops in
the
Civil War obscures the role that blacks themselves
played
in their own liberation. African Americans were
initially
forbidden by the Union to fight in the Civil War,
and
black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin
Delany
demanded the right to fight for their freedom. When
racist
doctrine finally conceded to military necessity,
blacks
were recruited into the Union Army in 1862 at
approximately
half the pay of white soldiers -- a situation
which
was partially rectified by an act of Congress in
mid-1864.
Some 170,000 blacks served in the Civil War,
representing
nearly one third of the free black population.
By
1860, four million blacks in the U.S. were enslaved; some
500,000
were nominally free. Because of slavery, racist
laws,
and racist policies, blacks were denied the chance to
compete
for the opportunities and resources of America that
were
available to native whites and immigrants: labor
opportunities,
free enterprise, and land. The promise of
"forty
acres and a mule" to former slaves was effectively
nullified
by the actions of President Andrew Johnson. And
because
the best land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862
and
its subsequent revisions quickly fell under the sway of
white
homesteaders and speculators, most former slaves were
unable
to take advantage of its provisions.
4.
Most Living Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or
Indirect)
To Slavery
As
Joseph Anderson, member of the National Council of
African
American Men, observed, "the arguments for
reparations
aren't made on the basis of whether every white
person
directly gained from slavery. The arguments are made
on
the basis that slavery was institutionalized and
protected
by law in the United States. As the government is
an
entity that survives generations, its debts and
obligations
survive the lifespan of any particular
individuals.
. . . Governments make restitution to victims
as
a group or class." (San Francisco Chronicle, March 26,
2001,
p. A21.)
Most
Americans today were not alive during World War II. Yet
reparations
to Japanese Americans for their internment in
concentration
camps during the war was paid out of current
government
sources contributed to by contemporary Americans.
Passage
of time does not negate the responsibility of
government
in crimes against humanity. Similarly, German
corporations
are not the "same" corporations that supported
the
Holocaust; their personnel and policies today belong to
generations
removed from their earlier criminal behavior.
Yet,
these corporations are being successfully sued by Jews
for
their past actions. In the same vein, the U.S.
government
is not the same government as it was in the
pre-civil
war era, yet its debts and obligations from the
past
are no less relevant today.
5.
The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations
Claim
Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race
Not
Injury
As
noted in our response to "Reason 4," the historical
precedents
for the reparations claims of African Americans
are
fully consistent with restitution accorded other
historical
groups for atrocities committed against them.
Second,
the injury in question -- that of slavery -- was
inflicted
upon a people designated as a race. The
descendants
of that people -- still socially constructed as
a
race today -- continue to suffer the institutional
legacies
of slavery some one hundred thirty-five years after
its
demise. To attempt to separate the issue of so-called
race
from that of injury in this instance is pure sophistry.
For
example, the criminal (in)justice system today largely
continues
to operate as it did under slavery -- for the
protection
of white citizens against black "outsiders."
Although
no longer inscribed in law, this very attitude is
implicit
to processes of law enforcement, prosecution, and
incarceration,
guiding the behavior of police, prosecutors,
judges,
juries, wardens, and parole boards. Hence, African
Americans
continue to experience higher rates of
incarceration
than do whites charged with similar crimes,
endure
longer sentences for the same classes of crimes
perpetrated
by whites, and, compared to white inmates,
receive
far less consideration by parole boards when being
considered
for release.
Slavery
was an institution sanctioned by the highest laws of
the
land with a degree of support from the Constitution
itself.
The institution of slavery established the idea and
the
practice that American democracy was "for whites only."
There
are many white Americans whose actions (or lack
thereof)
reveal such sentiments today -- witness the
response
of the media and the general populace to the
blatant
disfranchisement of African Americans in Florida
during
the last presidential election. Would such
complacency
exist if African Americans were considered "real
citizens"?
And despite the dramatic successes of the Civil
Rights
movement of the 1950s and 60s, the majority of black
Americans
do not enjoy the same rights as white Americans in
the
economic sphere. (We continue this argument in the
following
section.)
6.
The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim
That
All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From
The
Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination
Most
blacks suffered and continue to suffer the economic
consequences
of slavery and its aftermath. As of 1998,
median
white family income in the U.S. was $49,023; median
black
family income was $29,404, just 60% of white income.
(2001
New York Times Almanac, p. 319) Further, the costs of
living
within the United States far exceed those of African
nations.
The present poverty level for an American family of
four
is $17,029. Twenty-three and three-fifths percent
(23.6%)
of all black families live below the poverty level.
When
one examines net financial worth, which reflects, in
part,
the wealth handed down within families from generation
to
generation, the figures appear much starker. Recently,
sociologists
Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro found
that
just a little over a decade ago, the net financial
worth
of white American families with zero or negative net
financial
worth stood at around 25%; that of Hispanic
households
at 54%; and that of black American households at
almost
61%. (Oliver & Shapiro, p. 87) The inability to
accrue
net financial worth is also directly related to
hiring
practices in which black Americans are "last hired"
when
the economy experiences an upturn, and "first fired"
when
it falls on hard times.
And
as historian John Hope Franklin remarked on the legacy
of
slavery for black education: "laws enacted by states
forbade
the teaching of blacks any means of acquiring
knowledge-including
the alphabet-which is the legacy of
disadvantage
of educational privatization and discrimination
experienced
by African Americans in 2001."
Horowitz's
comparison of African Americans with Jamaicans is
a
false analogy, ignoring the different historical contexts
of
the two populations. The British government ended slavery
in
Jamaica and its other West Indian territories in 1836,
paying
West Indian slaveholders $20,000,000 pounds
($100,000,000
U.S. dollars) to free the slaves, and leaving
the
black Jamaicans, who comprised 90% of that island's
population,
relatively free. Though still facing racist
obstacles,
Jamaicans come to the U.S. as voluntary
immigrants,
with greater opportunity to weigh, choose, and
develop
their options.
7.
The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn
African-Americans
Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message
To
The African-American Community
What
is a victim? Black people have certainly been
victimized,
but acknowledgment of that fact is not a case of
"playing
the victim" but of seeking justice. There is no
validity
to Horowitz's comparison between black Americans
and
victims of oppressive regimes who have voluntary
immigrated
to these shores. Further, many members of those
populations,
such as Chileans and Salvadorans, direct their
energies
for redress toward the governments of their own
oppressive
nations -- which is precisely what black
Americans
are doing. Horowitz's racism is expressed in his
contemptuous
characterization of reparations as "an
extravagant
new handout that is only necessary because some
blacks
can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within
reach
of others, many of whom are less privileged than
themselves."
What Horowitz fails to acknowledge is that
racism
continues as an ideology and a material force within
the
U.S., providing blacks with no ladder that reaches the
top.
The damage lies in the systematic treatment of black
people
in the U.S., not their claims against those who
initiated
this daO/+e and their spiritual descendants who
continue
its perpetuation.
8.
Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid
The
nearest the U.S. government came to full and permanent
restitution
of African Americans was the spontaneous
redistribution
of land brought about by General William
Sherman's
Field Order 15 in January, 1865, which empowered
Union
commanders to make land grants and give other material
assistance
to newly liberated blacks. But that order was
rescinded
by President Andrew Johnson later in the year.
Efforts
by Representative Thaddeus Stevens and other radical
Republicans
to provide the proverbial "40 acres and a mule"
which
would have carved up huge plantations of the defeated
Confederacy
into modest land grants for blacks and poor
whites
never got out of the House of Representatives. The
debt
has not been paid.
"Welfare
benefits and racial preferences" are not
reparations.
The welfare system was set in place in the
1930s
to alleviate the poverty of the Great Depression, and
more
whites than blacks received welfare. So-called "racial
preferences"
come not from benevolence but from lawsuits by
blacks
against white businesses, government agencies, and
municipalities
which practice racial discrimination.
9.
What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?
Horowitz's
assertion that "in the thousand years of
slavery's
existence, there never was an anti-slavery
movement
until white Anglo-Saxon Christians created one,"
only
demonstrates his ignorance concerning the formidable
efforts
of blacks to free themselves. Led by black Toussaint
L'Ouverture,
the Haitian revolution of 1793 overthrew the
French
slave system, created the first black republic in the
world,
and intensified the activities of black and white
anti-slavery
movements in the U.S. Slave insurrections and
conspiracies
such as those of Gabriel (1800), Denmark Vesey
(1822),
and Nat Turner (1831) were potent sources of black
resistance;
black abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman,
Frederick
Douglass, Richard Allen, Sojourner Truth, Martin
Delany,
David Walker, and Henry Highland Garnet waged an
incessant
struggle against slavery through agencies such as
the
press, notably Douglass's North Star and its variants,
which
ran from 1847 to 1863 (blacks, moreover, constituted
some
75 % of the subscribers to William Lloyd Garrison's
Liberator
newspaper in its first four years); the
Underground
Railroad, the Negro Convention Movement, local,
state,
and national anti-slavery societies, and the slave
narrative.
Black Americans were in no ways the passive
recipients
of freedom from anyone, whether viewed from the
perspective
of black participation in the abolitionist
movement,
the flight of slaves from plantations and farms
during
the Civil War, or the enlistment of black troops in
the
Union army.
The
idea of black debt to U.S. society is a rehash of the
Christian
missionary argument of the 17th and 18th
centuries:
because Africans were considered heathens, it was
therefore
legitimate to enslave them and drag them in chains
to
a Christian nation. Following their partial conversion,
their
moral and material lot were improved, for which black
folk
should be eternally grateful. Slave ideologues John
Calhoun
and George Fitzhugh updated this idea in the 19th
century,
arguing that blacks were better off under slavery
than
whites in the North who received wages, due to the
paternalism
and benevolence of the plantation system which
assured
perpetual employment, shelter, and board. Please
excuse
the analogy, but if someone chops off your fingers
and
then hands them back to you, should you be "grateful"
for
having received your mangled fingers, or enraged that
they
were chopped off in the first place?
10.
The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets
African-Americans
Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom
Again,
Horowitz reverses matters. Blacks are already
separated
from white America in fundamental matters such as
income,
family wealth, housing, legal treatment, education,
and
political representation. Andrew Hacker, for example,
has
argued the case persuasively in his book Two Nations. To
ignore
such divisions, and then charge those who raise valid
claims
against society with promoting divisiveness, offers a
classic
example of "blaming the victim." And we have already
refuted
the spurious point that African Americans were the
passive
recipients of benevolent white individuals or
institutions
which "gave" them freedom.
Too
many Americans tend to view history as "something that
happened
in the past," something that is "over and done,"
and
thus has no bearing upon the present. Especially in the
case
of slavery, nothing could be further from the truth. As
historian
John Hope Franklin noted in his response to
Horowitz:
"Most
living Americans do have a connection with slavery.
They
have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are
white,
or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are black; and
those
positions are virtually as alive today as they were in
the
19th century. The pattern of housing, the discrimination
in
employment, the resistance to equal opportunity in
education,
the racial profiling, the inequities in the
administration
of justice, the low expectation of blacks in
the
discharge of duties assigned to them, the widespread
belief
that blacks have physical prowess but little
intellectual
capacities and the widespread opposition to
affirmative
action, as if that had not been enjoyed by
whites
for three centuries, all indicate that the vestiges
of
slavery are still with us."
"And
as long as there are pro-slavery protagonists among us,
hiding
behind such absurdities as "we are all in this
together"
or "it hurts me as much as it hurts you" or
"slavery
benefited you as much as it benefited me," we will
suffer
from the inability to confront the tragic legacies of
slavery
and deal with them in a forthright and constructive
manner."
"Most
important, we must never fall victim to some scheme
designed
to create a controversy among potential allies in
order
to divide them and, at the same time, exploit them for
its
own special purpose."
-------------------------------------------------------------
Ernest
Allen, Jr. is Professor of Afro-American Studies at
the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Robert Chrisman is
Editor-in-Chief
and Publisher, The Black Scholar.
-------------------------------------------------------------
BIBLIOGRAPHY
2001
New York Times Almanac (New York: Penguin Books, 2000).
Richard
F. America, Paying the Social Debt: What White
America
Owes Black America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993).
J.
D. B. DeBow, "The Interest in Slavery of the Southern
Non-Slaveholder,"
in Slavery Defended: The Views of the Old
South,
ed. Eric L. McKitrick (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall,
1963), 169-77.
Ira
Berlin and others, Slaves No More: Three Essays on
Emancipation
and the Civil War (Cambridge [England]; New
York:
Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Dalton
Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth,
and
Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of
California
Press, 1999).
LaWanda
Cox, "The Promise of Land for the Freedmen,"
Mississippi
Valley Historical Review 45 (December 1958):
413-40.
Dudley
Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the
Union
Army, 1861-1865 (1956; rpt. Lawrence, KS: University
Press
of Kansas, 1987).
Eric
Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: the Ideology of
the
Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford
University
Press, 1970).
John
Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to
Freedom:
A History of African Americans, 7th ed. (New York:
McGraw-Hill,
1994).
Andrew
Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate,
Hostile,
Unequal, rev. ed. (New York: Ballantine Books,
1995).
James
Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty:
Culture,
Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks,
1700-1860
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
James
L. Huston, "Property Rights in Slavery and the Coming
of
the Civil War," Journal of Southern History 65 (1999):
249-86.
James
Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American
Slaveholders
(New York: Vintage Books, 1983).
Melvin
L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White
Wealth:
A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York:
Routledge,
1995).
Benjamin
Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford
University
Press, 1969).
-------,
The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown,
1953).
Walter
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, rev. ed.
(Washington,
DC: Howard University Press, 1981).
Jack
Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, eds.,
Encyclopedia
of African-American Culture and History, 5
vols.
(New York: Macmillan Library Reference USA: Simon &
Schuster
Macmillan; London: Simon & Schuster and Prentice
Hall
International, 1996).
Diana
Jean Schemo, "An Ad Provokes Campus Protests and
Pushes
Limits of Expression," New York Times, 21 March 2001,
pp.
A1, A17.
Abbot
Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage; White Servitude
and
Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill: Pub.
for
the Institute of Early American History and Culture at
Williamsburg,
Va., by the University of North Carolina
Press,
1947).
Barbara
L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., British
Capitalism
and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric
Williams
(Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge
University
Press, 1987).
Eric
Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (1944; rpt. New York:
Russell
& Russell, 1961).
Copyright
(c) 2001 Robert Chrisman and Ernest Allen, Jr.
All
Rights Reserved.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Slavery and the Genocide Treaty
The Pioneer (CSU Hayward)
April 12, 2001
Opinion
Slavery and the Genocide
Treaty
By Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
<rdunbaro@pacbell.net>
In addition to my academic
research and teaching during the
past 27 years at Cal State
Hayward, I have researched,
lobbied government
representatives, and assisted in writing
international human rights
law, particularly as it applies
to indigenous peoples, ethnic
groups, and migrant workers
all over the world.
Currently, I am involved in preparations
for the United Nations
sponsored World Conference Against
Racism, to be held in Durban,
South Africa, in September
this year. The issue of
reparations for the enslavement of
Africans in the United States
certainly will be central.
In looking at questions of
reparations for slavery, one
cannot begin with the
conclusion, that is determining the
remedy; rather the question
arises from social movements of
the aggrieved group and an
objective investigation into the
harm alleged must take place.
Before the US Congress, there
is legislation that calls for
such an investigation that
should be supported by all
without prejudice to the
conclusions and
recommendations.
My own thinking is that the
issue of African slavery in the
United States falls within
the 1948 Genocide Convention, an
international treaty that has
no statute of limitations and
is retroactive. Here are the
provisions of Genocide
Convention:
Article 1. The Contracting
Parties confirm that genocide,
whether committed in time of
peace or in time of war, is a
crime under international law
which they undertake to
prevent and to punish.
Article 2. In the present
Convention, genocide means any of
the following Acts committed
with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the
group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the
group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in
whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures
intended to prevent births within the
group;
(e) Forcibly transferring
children of the group to another
group.
Article 3. The following acts
shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit
genocide;
(c) Direct and public
incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit
genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Ordinarily, a nation-state
that has committed historical
acts that might be construed
as constituting genocide would
distance itself from former
regimes that held power when the
acts were committed. For
instance the present Republic of
Turkey eschews its
responsibility for the Armenian genocide
by claiming a break in the
"succession of states," meaning
that the acts (which in fact
the contemporary government of
Turkey denies as having
occurred) took place under a former
and now discredited regime,
the Ottoman Empire that no
longer exists.
The contemporary United
States government could also
preclude charges of genocide
by breaking its ties with
regimes that existed before
the Civil War. Although the
introduction of Jim Crow laws
in the former Confederate
states and their
legitimization by the US Supreme Court on
the basis of "states
rights" would possibly require severing
the succession of states up
to the 1954 Brown decision in
the Supreme Court.
In order to implement a break
in the succession of states,
the United States, among
other things, would have to cease
honoring its "founding
fathers" and the founding documents,
as well as each and everyone
of the administrations that
maintained the legality and
constitutionality of slavery.
Such revisions would have to
be accompanied by apologies to
the descendants of the
aggrieved and possibly include damage
awards or reparations.
Certainly, the severance of
succession of states would
require the revision of approved
US history textbooks,
national monuments, and government
rhetoric in much the same
manner that Germany and Austria
were required to do after
World War II.
In terms of reparations, the
question arises as to who would
receive and who would pay.
That question should not arise
until after an investigation
that would recommend
reparations. The recent
example of the 1921 destruction of
the African-American
Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
by a white riot that included
Oklahoma National Guardsmen
assisting the rioters, is a
good example of procedure. After
a thorough investigation, the
investigative committee made
its recommendations,
including calling for reparations for
the heirs of those who were
killed or lost their property.
It is now in the hands of the
state legislature to determine
whether to pay reparations
and if so, how to do so and how
much.
In the case of Nazi genocide
against the Jewish people of
Europe, the anti-Nazi
governments of Germany have been and
continue to be required to
pay reparations to the state of
Israel. Paying to an
institutional body, such as a
trusteeship for
African-Americans, rather than individual,
per capita payments as in the
Japanese-American
incarceration reparations,
would be the most likely solution
regarding reparations for
slavery.
A great deal of extraneous
questions and hypotheses (such as
those voiced by David
Horowitz in his infamous paid
advertisements opposing
reparations for slavery) get thrown
into the discussions of the
issue and cloud the matter.
Questions of who captured and
sold slaves, who transported
them, who owned them, and the
existence of European
indentured servants in
colonial North America, are
historically interesting but
irrelevant questions for
determining United States
genocide against enslaved
African-Americans. Because a
few Jews collaborated with
Nazis does not invalidate the
reality of genocide against
the Jews.
However the African slave
trade and enslavement of Africans
began, functioned, and
proceeded, the fact is that the
United States was founded on
not only the legalization of
African slavery but also on
the sanctity of "property."
African slaves were by far
the most valuable property at the
time of the founding of the
United States. For those who
argue that "in those
times" everyone accepted slavery, they
surely cannot mean the
Africans who were enslaved, nor can
they ignore the fact that
slavery was debated, was opposed
by most Quakers, and the
international slave trade had been
outlawed two decades earlier
by the British under pressure
by the British Anti-Slavery
Society.
Another indisputable fact
pertinent to the Genocide
Convention is that ONLY
persons of African descent were
enslaved in the United
States. That fact does not diminish
the horrors of Chinese
contract laborers or Irish famine
victims building canals and
railroads, nor any other
oppression that occurred
historically. The question should
not be "where will it
all end?" but rather "when will it all
begin?" When will we as
citizens of the United States
confront the fact that unpaid
labor of African slaves (and
the land stolen from Native
Americans) produced the
accumulation of capital
necessary for the United States to
become the richest and most
powerful country in the history
of humankind?
[Anyone interested in
reparations for slavery would be
advised to read Randall
Robinson's The Debt.]
Copyright (c) 2001 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. All Rights Reserved.
Links to two articles by Marie Roberts on The Question of Reparations to African Americans
-
Greenwich Village Gazette
December 1, 2000
The Question of
Reparations to African Americans
By Marie Roberts <mrobertsusa@yahoo.com>
Increasingly, the subject of
reparations to African
Americans is in the news and
I, a white American woman,
want to express my own
personal, deeply felt views on
this extremely important
matter. In short, I support
them passionately and wish to
say why:
http://www.nycny.com/columns/guests/roberts12-01-00.html
--
Greenwich Village Gazette
February 2, 2001
White Woman Embraces Black
Reparations
By Marie Roberts <mrobertsusa@yahoo.com>
In a recent article I
explained why I, a white American
woman, ardently support
reparations to African Americans.
I believe that in permitting
slavery, our country committed
one of the longest-running
and most heinous human rights
crimes in all of history.
Therefore, I know of no better
way to celebrate Black
History Month than by continuing
to presenting my views on why
and how we should rectify
this grave injustice: